Noninvasive quantification of cerebral blood volume in humans during functional activation

Like cerebral blood flow (CBF), cerebral blood volume (CBV) is an important physiological parameter closely associated with brain activity and thus, noninvasive quantification of CBV during brain activation provides another opportunity to investigate the relationship between neuronal activity and hemodynamic changes. In this paper, a new method is presented that is able to quantify CBV at rest and during activation. Specifically, using an inversion recovery pulse sequence, a set of brain images was collected at various inversion times (TIs). At each TI, functional images were acquired with a block-design visual stimulation paradigm. A biophysical model comprised of multiple tissue components was developed and was utilized for the determination of CBV using the visual stimulation data. MRI experiments on five healthy volunteers showed that CBV was 5.0 +/- 1.5 ml blood/100 ml brain during rest and increased to 6.6 +/- 1.8 ml blood/100 ml brain following visual stimulation. Furthermore, experiments with visual stimulation at two frequencies (2 and 8 Hz) showed that the increases in CBV correlated with the strength of stimulation. This technique, with its ability to measure quantitative CBV values noninvasively, provides a valuable tool for quantifying hemodynamic signals associated with brain activation.